112 Agnes Petocz
(Greenwood, 1992, 1994, 2007), in Bhaskar's "critical realism" (Archer et al., 1998; Bhaskar,
1975, 1986, 1998; Hartwig, 2007), in Harré 's "ethogenic" realism (Harré, 1986, 1989, 1995,
1997a, 1997b; Varela & Harré, 2007), or in Cavell's realist social psychoanalysis (Cavell,
2006). But each of these has a somewhat different account of the nature of that mind-
independent reality.
Now, there is one version of realism which is thoroughgoing in the sense that it begins by
drawing attention to the basic logical principles which underlie and are necessarily assumed
by all positions, and then goes on to show that the different alternative "versions" of realism
consist in variations on developments which contradict those assumed principles. That is, the
varieties of realism are actually different packages of realist and non-realist elements. In
contrast, a thoroughgoing realism does not entertain exceptions to its assumed principles, and
so does not end up in contradictions. The realism that I have in mind here has sometimes been
called Australian realism, Andersonian realism or Sydney realism (cf. Baker, 1986; Mackie,
1962; Passmore, 1962), because its core is found in the work of the Scottish-Australian
philosopher John Anderson (1893-1962). It has also been called situational realism (e.g.,
Hibberd, 2009). With roots in the British (particularly Scottish) and American realist
traditions, it is a realism which has an established place in philosophy (cf. Monnoyer, 2004),
but whose extension to psychology has been relatively piecemeal (but cf. Maze, 1983) and
only recently collated and presented systematically (Mackay & Petocz, in press [b]^7 ; Henry,
2009).
This realist approach is characterised by a number of different interlinked principles
about ontology, logic, epistemology, causation, science and so on. Here is not the place to
spell these out in any comprehensive or exhaustive way, nor to detail and explore the
resulting critique of alternative realisms. Rather, my concern here is with just four of the
aspects of this thoroughgoing realism - those, namely, which are the victims of mainstream
scientific psychology's lapses from realism. As I shall argue, these four aspects not only
challenge the four reasons for psychology's neglect of semiotics, but also provide the required
solid foundations for a fruitful scientific convergence of semiotics and psychology.
Four Key Aspects of a Realist Approach
The first key aspect of realism is an externalist relational view of mind. As the
behaviourists insisted, what is internal to the behaving organism is not mental, but simply the
physical brain and its various chemical and neural processes, connected to the perceptual
apparatus. The study of these processes is physiology or neurophysiology. Psychology deals
with the relation between the organism and its environment. In arguing thus, the behaviourists
were on the right track. But they were trapped by Cartesian assumptions into thinking that
there could not be a concept of mind or mentality which is simultaneously externalist and
materialist. That is because, as Stove (1991) remarked when discussing idealism, ―No one
(^7) This book (an edited collection of old and new essays) was a response to the steadily increasing number of calls
for a (situational) realist psychology to show what it has to offer, following Stam's (2001) complaint that "the
lack of a large, explicitly realist body of work in psychology" means that "once one argues for a psychology
that is explicitly realist (as opposed to constructionist, phenomenalist, instrumentalist, etc.), one has very little
to go on" (p. 295). The book was also motivated by the need to expose some of the debilitating pseudo-realist
aspects of the dominant position in mainstream scientific psychology.